Why is it that first days of road trips always end up being longer than planned?

Somehow, they always are!

It’s 5:40 p.m. and we’re still rolling. I’d hoped to have dinner well underway by now. Instead, we licked up drippy ice cream cones over the blacktop of a gas station and gathered our courage for the last big push to our first campsite.

Joash licked his cone enthusiastically. “I just spooked, you know!” He announced.

“You what??”

“I spooked! But I got my face out of the van!” he is justly proud. His parents are thankful. Spook on the sidewalk is gross, spook all over three of your five siblings and the inside of the van on the first day of a five week road trip is just… well, nasty.

“Oh, you puked did you? Well, five extra points for getting it outside the van!”

He grinned proudly and tucked into his vanilla cone. James chuckled.

It’s actually been a pretty great day.

We stopped at Otway Fly and took a lovely treetop walk through the tip top of a eucalypt rainforest that smelled like heaven after a spring rain. Looking down over the giant ferns reaching for the sky between the grey green trunks of elegant trees sloughing off bark like wooden snakes, examining the beautiful koru curling up toward the sky and listening to the laughter of children made for a lovely bush walk as we stretched our legs from the journey.

Nathaniel

Joash

Joash

Joash & Elijah